Business Systems Analyst to Replace Systems Analyst/Help Desk

the_Grinch

I've been discussing with the Analytics Manager a concept I had recently read about in a book and that we've discussed here. Basically, you lose your help desk and replace them with Business Systems Analyst. At my college (unit within the university is a college) there is two of us on the help desk and for the most part the end user issues are rare. We tend to end up doing more business systems analysis related work then anything else. We also tend to hire people basically fresh out of college and I've notice they are fairly technical. As an example, one of our Reps has literally never submitted a ticket except for the last month and she's been here over a year (the ticket was for a password reset).

Most of our systems are completely in the cloud so it really amounts to the user going to a website to use whatever app is needed. Technically, we could default to the university's help desk if there were issues. Now a problem that we have is decision makers without the technical savy to make proper decisions on software they need. The other half of this problem is an IT Department who came to the point of just saying no. This has lead to us being out of loop and departments going around us. Thus we have a bit of a turf war and have been ineffective in accomplishing our mission as a whole.

As it stands right now several units are administrating their own systems for the duties that they have, leaving us with the few "bigger" apps. Mainly Salesforce, the website, and a few internally built applications. I am going to break down my thoughts to see if A. anyone has done this already (and with what results) and B. is it the direction most places are going?

Premise - Management has finally come to the realization that our current operating model is ineffective. We're becoming more data driven and are looking to improve our current systems (or replace them) so we can better accomplish our goals.

My Goal - Empower the user to build their own reports and apps to better do their jobs, allow them to effectively see if a campaign they've instituted worked or if it should be pulled to try something else.

User breakdown

Citizen Developer - This would be a tech savy user (such as the lady who never put in a ticket) who could be taught to visually create applications and/or reports to suit her needs. We use Salesforce, so that can be very easy to do along with Tableau for data analytics. She in turn can share apps that are useful for everyone or just get rid of the app after it accomplishes the task. She could also help with easy questions from less savy users (but the BSA would serve as the main contact).

Business Systems Analyst - This would be a hybrid person with the business and technical background for the position. They would be more programtic (have the ability to write some code as needed), but at the very least have the understanding to articulate what is needed to the "IT Department". They'd also handle any of the initial old help desk duties (their people's computer issues along with account creations). They'd also serve as trainers for the software, building reports/apps, and guide Citizen Developers on which tool will work for the job.

Systems Developers/Administrators - These will be the people making everything go and actual make sure the data is available/scrubbed properly. They'd still be building the architecture and would work with business systems analyst to properly accomplish the business goals. In this case, they'd no longer fall into an IT Department, but would fall under Operations reporting directly to the COO.

It just seems to me that our old way of operating is not working anymore. We know a lot about how the business works, but we don't seem to factor it into the things that we do. Plus it's very much us against them, who's fault is it that this or that doesn't work. I should also note that all our critical infrastructure (email, phones, network, shared drives, etc) are run through the university so we don't touch those things.

DissonantData

Are you saying that the traditional helpdesk is becoming obsolete? Are you saying that now all IT professionals will need hybrid business - tech skills? What impact will all of this have on areas such as networking, database management, and information security? Could you post links to some articles? This is definitely an interesting read.

the_Grinch

I do believe that helpdesk is becoming obsolete. I also do believe all IT professionals will find they need to have business skills along side of their tech skills. That being said, anything infrastructure related would still need those professionals (networking, database management, server administration). Yeah I'll post some stuff shortly.